On Fri, May 08, 2020 at 03:41:36AM +0530, Purusharth Saxena wrote:
Hi folks,
I'm packaging tpcclib (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1832562)
and as per the review, I wanted to confirm the licence for tpcclib (
https://gitlab.utu.fi/vesoik/tpcclib/-/blob/master/license.md)
Should it be "GPLv2+ and GPLv3+ "or something else?
The copying.md file includes this:
"This program library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any
later version."
The '+' on the GPLv3+ means "GPL version 3 or any later version.
It's also a good idea to check for license text in individual files in the
project. For GPL projects, I like to do this:
find . -type f | xargs grep "General Public"
Which does a more or less ok job of finding files with what is probably a GPL
boilerplate. That gives me 39 files. Now, that's all files including
non-source. But in this case I am looking for any file that would indicate
something other than GPLv3+ Further refining:
find . -type f | xargs grep "General Public" | \
cut -d ':' -f 1 | sort | uniq
Gives me 10 files. I can do this:
find . -type f | xargs grep "General Public" | \
cut -d ':' -f 1 | sort | uniq \
xargs grep -i "any later version"
And see it matches 6 files. So 4 of those original files found lack the same
kind of boilerplate. Running the previous command and comparing it to what
was found, I see the sounds files in v1/ and v2/ were left out. Specifically:
v1/tools/htmlfind.c.bak
v2/libtpcabss/temp/algtimes.c
v2/libtpcabss/temp/blotimes.c
v2/libtpcabss/temp/scanditronics.c
Forget for a moment that there's a ".c.bak" file. That's odd to find in
version control, but we'll look at it anyway. I am manually inspecting each
of those files with less(1) and I find:
v1/tools/htmlfind.c.bak: GPLv2+
v2/libtpcabss/temp/algtimes.c: GPLv2+
v2/libtpcabss/temp/blotimes.c: GPLv2+
v2/libtpcabss/temp/scanditronics.c: GPLv2+
So these files carry a GPL version 2.0 boilerplate. I am not sure if
libtpcabss is built as a separate shared library or not. And I also don't
know if all of the code it links in carries GPLv2+ boilerplates. My guess is
no, but you should verify.
Since the project is GPLv3+ and it incorporates GPLv2+ code in some capacity,
that makes the entire work GPLv3+ from our distribution standpoint. Unless
the GPLv2+ files are compiled and linked in to a standalone library with no
other GPLv3+ files, then you can't say there is some GPLv2+ component in the
project.
I would say the License for this package is GPLv3+
NOTE: The package maintainer is responsible for understanding the licenses
that apply to the source in the package. You should do an inspection of each
source file to see if there are other non-GPL license headers and how those
are compiled in to binary objects. The entire work looks to be a derived
GPLv3+ work, but it may have some shared libraries that are GPLv2+ or BSD or
MIT.
Thanks,
--
David Cantrell <dcantrell@xxxxxxxxxx>
Red Hat, Inc. | Boston, MA | EST5EDT
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